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Councillor Doug Ford launched an inaccurate attack on a member of Mayor Rob Ford’s hand-picked executive committee on Wednesday, falsely saying that Councillor Jaye Robinson’s absence from city hall forced a committee to cancel a scheduled meeting.

“Jaye Robinson is running around and saying the mayor should step away for a month. Well, today Jaye Robinson didn’t show up to the civic appointments meeting. We had to cancel the whole meeting, so we all have to come back for two or three more days,” Doug Ford said in an interview with CP24’s Stephen LeDrew.

Ford made similar comments to Global News. In fact, however, the meeting was
held and completed
without Robinson, who has come down with a respiratory illness. Doug Ford, a member of the committee, was at the meeting himself.

Two of the four items on the agenda were deferred to a later date, possibly because the nine-member committee was in danger of losing quorum. But Robinson was not solely responsible for the quorum trouble: three other committee members were also absent, including administration ally Michael Thompson.

Robinson, arguably the most liberal member of Rob Ford’s executive, has criticized his handling of a three-week-old crack cocaine scandal. She suggested last week that he take a leave of absence.

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Councillor James Pasternak, the centrist vice-chair of the committee, said Doug Ford’s comments “weren’t warranted.” He said Robinson’s absence “seemed fully justified.”

Robinson, conducting a phone interview in a croaking voice, said she had emailed the chair, vice-chair, and clerk to inform them she could not make the meeting. She called Doug Ford’s comments “cringeworthy” and “a cheap political stunt.”

“All I can make of it is: it’s really unfortunate. And it’s also not true. It’s not true! I’m very ill; I even toyed with checking myself into the hospital because I just feel like I have 300 pounds on my chest. Like, I’m bedridden. There’s no way I could have got there. It’s just really unfortunate behaviour. And I would never stoop to that level. Truth is important in politics,” Robinson said.

Asked if she believes it is possible that Doug Ford was attempting to retaliate for her comments about the mayor, she said, “I think with the Fords anything’s possible.”

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